Perdido Street Station

by China Miéville

  Eventually, when the temperature fell and they had all forgotten the stink, they had moved. It had been a long, arduous journey through New Crobuzon’s vaulted conduits. Lemuel had led, flintlocks ready. Isaac, Derkhan and Yagharek had to carry the construct, which could not move in the liquid filth. It was heavy and slippery, and it had been dropped and banged and damaged, as had they, falling into the muck and swearing, slamming hands and fingers against the concrete walls. Isaac would not let them leave it.

  They had moved carefully. They were intruders in the sewer’s hidden and hermetic ecosystem. They had been keen to avoid the natives. Eventually they had emerged behind Saltpetre Station, blinking and dripping in the waning light.

  They had bedded down in a little deserted hut beside the railway in Griss Fell. It was an audacious hideout. Just before the Sud Line crossed the Tar by Cockscomb Bridge, a collapsed building made a huge slope of half-crushed brick and concrete splinters that seemed to shore up the raised railway. At the top, dramatically silhouetted, they saw the wooden shack.

  Its purpose was unclear: it had obviously remained untouched for years. The four of them had crawled exhausted up the industrial scree, shoving the construct before them, through the ripped-up wire that was supposed to protect the railway from intruders. In the minutes between trains, they had hauled themselves along the little fringe of scrubby grass that surrounded the tracks, and pushed open the door into the hut’s dusty darkness.

  There, finally, they had relaxed.

  The wood of the shed was warped, its slats ill-fitting and interspersed with sky. They had watched out of the glassless windows as trains burst by them in both directions. Below them to the north, the Tar twisted in the tight S that contained Petty Coil and Griss Twist. The sky had darkened to a grubby blue-black. They could see illuminated pleasure-boats on the river. The massive industrial pillar of Parliament loomed a little way to the east, looking down on them and on the city. A little downriver from Strack Island, the chymical lights of the old city watergates hissed and sputtered and reflected their greasy yellow glow in the dark water. Two miles to the north-east, just visible behind Parliament, were the Ribs, those antique sallow bones.

  From the other side of the cabin they saw the spectacularly darkening sky, made even more astonishing by a day in the reeking dun below New Crobuzon. The sun was gone, but only just. The sky was bisected by the skyrail that threaded through Flyside militia tower. The city was a layered silhouette, an intricate fading chimneyscape, slate roofs bracing each other obliquely below the plaited towers of churches to obscure gods, the huge priapic vents of factories spewing dirty smoke and burning off excess energy, monolithic towerblocks like vast concrete gravestones, the rough down of parkland.

  They had rested, cleaned the nightsoil from their clothes as much as they could. Here, finally, Isaac had tended the stub of Derkhan’s ear. It had numbed, but was still painful. She bore it with heavy reserve. Isaac and Lemuel had fingered their own scarred remnants uncomfortably.

  As the night had crept up faster, Isaac had readied himself to go. The argument had erupted again. Isaac was resolute. He needed to see Lin alone.

  He had to tell her that she was in danger as soon as the militia connected her to him. He had to tell her that her life as she had lived it was over, and that it was his fault. He needed to ask her to come with him, to run with him. He needed her forgiveness and her affection.

  One night with her, alone. That was all.

  Lemuel would not acquiesce. “It’s our fucking heads too, ’Zaac,” he had hissed. “Every militiaman in the city is after your hide. Your helio’s probably pasted up in every tower and strut and floor of the Spike. You don’t know how to get around. Me, I’ve been wanted all my working life. If you go for your ladybird, I come.”

  Isaac had had to give in.

  At half past ten, the four companions had wrapped themselves in their ruined clothes, obscuring their faces. After much coaxing, Isaac had finally been able to goad the construct into communication. Reluctantly and torturously slowly, it had scratched out its message.

  Griss Twist Dump number 2, it had written. Tomorrow night 10. Leave me below arches now.

  With the darkness, they had realized, came the nightmares. Even though they did not sleep. The mental nausea, as the slake-moth dung polluted the city’s sleep. Each of them grew tetchy and nervous.

  Isaac had stashed his carpet bag, containing the components of his crisis engine, under a pile of wooden slats in the shack. Then they had descended, carrying the construct for the last time. Isaac hid it in an alcove created where the structure of the railway bridge had crumbled.

  “Are you going to be all right?” he asked it tentatively, still feeling absurd talking to a machine. The construct did not answer him, and eventually he had left it. “See you tomorrow,” he said as he left.

  The criminal foursome skulked and stalked their clandestine way through New Crobuzon’s burgeoning night. Lemuel had taken his companions into the alternative city of hidden byways and strange cartography. They had evaded streets wherever there were alleys and alleys wherever there were broken channels in the concrete. They had crept through deserted yards and over flat roofs, waking the vagrants who grumbled and huddled together in their wake.

  Lemuel was confident. He swung his primed and loaded pistol easily as he climbed and ran, keeping them covered. Yagharek had adapted to his body without the weight of wings. His hollow bones and tight muscles moved efficiently. He swung lithely over the architectural landscape, leaping obstacles in the slate. Derkhan was dogged. She would not let herself fail to keep up.

  Isaac was the only one whose suffering showed. He wheezed and coughed and retched. He hauled his excess flesh along the thieves’ trails, breaking slates with his heavy slapping footfall, cradling his belly miserably. He swore constantly, every time he exhaled.

  They cut a trail deeper into the night, as if it were a forest. With every step, the air grew heavier. A sense of wrongness, of fraught unease, as if long nails scraped the surface of the moon, raising the hackles of the soul. From all around them came the cries of miserable, disturbed sleep.

  They stopped in Flyside, a few streets from the militia tower, and took water from a pump to wash and drink. Then south through the morass of alleys between Shadrach Street and Selchit Pass, bearing down on Aspic Hole.

  And there in that near-deserted and unearthly place, Isaac had bade his companions wait. Between sobs of desperate breath, he begged them to wait, to give him half an hour with her.

  “You’ve got to give me a little while to explain to her what’s going on . . .” he pleaded.

  They acquiesced, and hunkered down in the darkness at the base of the building.

  “Half an hour, ’Zaac,” said Lemuel clearly. “Then we’re coming up. Understand?”

  And so Isaac had begun slowly to climb the stairs.

  The tower was cool and quite silent. On the seventh floor, Isaac heard sound for the first time. It was the sleepy murmur and unceasing flutter of jackdaws. Up again, through the breezes that passed through the ruined and unsafe eighth floor, and on to the building’s crest.

  He stood before Lin’s familiar door. She may not be there, he reasoned. She’s probably still with that guy, her patron, doing her work. In which case I’ll just have to . . . leave a message for her.

  He knocked at the door, which fell open. His breath stalled in his throat. He rushed into the room.

  The air stank of putrefying blood. Isaac scanned the little attic space. He caught sight of what awaited him.

  Lucky Gazid gazed up at him sightlessly, propped on one of Lin’s chairs, sitting at the table as if at a meal. His shape was outlined in what little light crept up from the square below. Gazid’s arms were flat on the table. His hands were tense and hard as bone. His mouth was open and stuffed with something that Isaac could not clearly see. Gazid’s front was utterly drenched with blood. Blood had slicked on the table, seeping deep into the grain of the
wood. Gazid’s throat had been cut. In the summer heat it thronged with hungry little night insects.

  There was a second when Isaac thought that it might be a nightmare, one of the sick dreams that afflicted the city, spewing out of his unconscious on a slick of slake-moth dung and spattering into the æther.

  But Gazid did not disappear. Gazid was real, and really dead.

  Isaac looked at him. He blenched at Gazid’s screaming face. He looked again at the clawed hands. Gazid had been held down at the table, cut and held down until he died. Then something had been shoved into his gaping mouth.

  Isaac picked his way towards the corpse. He set his face and reached up, pulled from Gazid’s dry mouth a large envelope.

  When he unrolled it, he saw that the name carefully written on the front was his own. He reached inside with a nauseous foreboding.

  There was a moment, a tiny moment, when he did not recognize what he pulled out. Flimsy and almost weightless, it felt as he drew it out like crumbling parchment, like dead leaves. Then he held it in the faint grey light of the moonlit room and he saw it was a pair of khepri wings.

  Isaac let out a sound, an exhalation of shocked misery. His eyes widened in horror.

  “Oh no,” he said, hyperventilating. “Oh no oh no no no . . .”

  The wings had been bent and rolled, and their delicate substance was shattered. They desquamated in great clots of translucent matter. Isaac’s fingers trembled as he tried to smooth them down. His fingertips brushed their battered surface. He was humming a single note, a tremulous keening. He fumbled with the envelope, brought out a single sheet of folded paper.

  It was typewritten, with a chessboard or patchwork standard printed at its top. As he read it, Isaac began to cry out wordlessly.

  Copy 1: Aspic Hole.

  (Others to be delivered to Brock Marsh, Salacus Fields)

  Mr. Dan der Grimnebulin,

  Khepri cannot make sounds, but I judge by the chymicals she was exuding and the trembling of those bugger legs that Lin found the removal of these useless wings a deeply unpleasant experience. I don’t doubt that her lower body would also have been fighting us had we not strapped the bug-bitch in a chair.

  Lucky Gazid can give you this message, as it is he I have to thank for your interference.

  I gather that you have been trying to squeeze in on the dreamshit market. At first I thought you might have wanted all that ‘shit you bought from Gazid for yourself, but the idiot man’s wittering eventually turned to your caterpillar in Brock Marsh, and I realized the magnitude of your scheme.

  You would never get top grade ‘shit from a moth weaned on human-consumption dreamshit, of course, but you could have charged less for your inferior product. It is in my interest to keep all my customers connoisseurs. I will tolerate no competition.

  As I have subsequently learnt, and as one might have expected from an amateur, you couldn’t control your damn producer. Your shit-fed runt escaped through your incompetence, and liberated its siblings. You stupid man.

  Here are my demands. (i) That you give yourself up to me immediately. (ii) That you return the remains of the dreamshit you stole from me through Gazid, or pay me compensation (sum to be arranged). (iii) That you pursue the task of recapturing my producers, along with your pathetic specimen, to be handed over to me immediately. After such time as this, we will discuss your continued life.

  While we wait to hear your response, I will continue my discussions with Lin. I have been enjoying her company greatly over these last weeks, and relish the chance to deal with her more closely. We have a little wager. She bets that you will respond to this epistle while she still retains some of her headlegs. I remain unconvinced. The current rate is one headleg every two days we do not hear from you after today. Who will be proved right?

  I will rip them from her while she twitches and spits, do you understand? And within two weeks I will tear her carapace from her headbody and feed her living head to the rats. I will personally hold her down while they lunch.

  I very much look forward to hearing from you soon.

  Yours sincerely,

  Motley.

  When Derkhan, Yagharek and Lemuel reached the ninth floor, they could hear Isaac’s voice. He was talking slowly, in low tones. They could not make out what he was saying, but it sounded like a monologue. He was not pausing to hear or see any responses.

  Derkhan knocked on the door, and when there was no answer, she pushed it tentatively open and peered inside.

  She saw Isaac and another man. It was only a few seconds before she recognized Gazid, and saw that he had been butchered. She gasped and moved slowly inside, letting Yagharek and Lemuel slip in behind her.

  They stood and stared at Isaac. He was sitting on the bed, holding a pair of insectile wings and a piece of paper. He looked up at them and his murmuring subsided. He was crying without a sound. He opened his mouth and Derkhan moved over to him, grasped his hands. He sobbed and hid his eyes, his face twisted with rage. Without a sound she took the letter and read it.

  Her mouth quivered in horror. She emitted a mute little cry for her friend. She passed the letter to Yagharek, shaking, controlling herself.

  The garuda took it and perused it carefully. His reaction was invisible. He turned to Lemuel, who was examining Lucky Gazid’s corpse.

  “This one’s been dead a while,” he said, and accepted the letter.

  His eyes widened as he read.

  “Motley?” he breathed. “Lin’s been dealing with Motley?”

  “Who is he?” shouted Isaac. “Where is the fucking piece of scum . . . ?”

  Lemuel looked up at Isaac, his face open and aghast. Pity glimmered in his eyes as he saw Isaac’s tear-stained, snotty rage.

  “Oh Jabber . . . Mr. Motley is the kingpin, Isaac,” he said simply. “He is the man. He runs the eastern city. He runs it. He’s the outlaw boss.”

  “I’ll fucking kill the fucker, I’ll kill him, I’ll kill him . . .” Isaac raged.

  Lemuel watched him uneasily. You won’t, ’Zaac, he thought. You really won’t.

  “Lin . . . wouldn’t tell me who she’d been working for,” said Isaac, his voice calming slowly.

  “I’m not surprised,” said Lemuel. “Most people haven’t heard of him. Rumours, maybe . . . Nothing more.”

  Isaac stood suddenly. He dragged his sleeve across his face, sniffed hard and cleared his nose.

  “Right, we have to get her,” he said. “We have to find her. Let’s think. Think. This . . . Motley thinks I’ve been ripping him off, which I haven’t. Now, how can I get him to back down . . . ?”

  “ ’Zaac, ’Zaac . . .” Lemuel was frozen. He swallowed and looked away, then walked slowly towards Isaac, holding his hands up wide, begging him to calm down. Derkhan looked at him, and there it was again, that pity: hard and brusque, but undoubtedly there. Lemuel was shaking his head slowly. His eyes were hard, but his mouth worked silently as he groped for words.

  “ ’Zaac, I’ve dealt with Motley. I’ve never met the guy, but I know him. I know his work. I know how to deal with him, I know what to expect. I’ve seen this before, this exact kind of scenario . . . Isaac . . .” He swallowed and continued. “Lin’s dead.”

  “No, she is not,” shouted Isaac, clenching his hands and flailing them around his head.

  But Lemuel caught hold of his wrists, not hard or pugnaciously, but intensely, making him listen and understand. Isaac was still for a moment, his face wary and wrathful.

  “She’s dead, Isaac,” said Lemuel softly. “I’m sorry, mate. I really am. I’m sorry, but she’s gone.” He moved back. Isaac stood, stricken, shaking his head. His mouth opened as if he was trying to cry out. Lemuel was shaking his head slowly. He looked away from Isaac and spoke slowly and quietly, as if to himself.

  “Why would he keep her alive?” he said. “It just . . . It just doesn’t make sense . . . She’s a . . . an added complication, that’s all. Something . . . something it’s easier to dispense with.
He’s done what he needed to do,” he said, louder suddenly, raising his hand to gesticulate at Isaac. “He’s got you coming to him. He’s got revenge and he’s got you doing his bidding. He just wants you there . . . doesn’t matter how he gets it. And if he keeps her alive, there’s a tiny chance that she’d be trouble. But if he . . . dangles her like bait, you’ll come for her no matter what. Don’t matter if she’s alive.” He shook his head in sorrow. “There’s nothing in it for him not to kill her . . . She’s dead, Isaac. She’s dead.” Isaac’s eyes were glazing, and Lemuel spoke quickly. “And I’ll tell you this: the best way of getting your revenge is to keep those moths out of Motley’s hands. He won’t kill ’em, you know. He’ll keep them alive, so’s to get more dreamshit out of them.”

  Isaac was stamping around the room now, shouting denials, now in anger, now misery, now rage, now disbelief. He rushed at Lemuel, began to beg with him incoherently, tried to convince him that he must be mistaken. Lemuel could not watch Isaac’s supplication. He closed his eyes and spoke over the desperate babble.

  “If you go to him, ’Zaac, Lin won’t be any less dead. And you’ll be considerably more so.”

  Isaac’s noises dried. There was a long, quiet moment, while Isaac stood and his hands shook. He looked over at Lucky Gazid’s corpse, at Yagharek standing silent and hooded in the corner of the room, at Derkhan hovering near him, her own eyes filling, at Lemuel, watching him nervously.

  Isaac cried in earnest.

  Isaac and Derkhan sat, arms draped over each other, sniffling and weeping.

  Lemuel stalked over to Gazid’s stinking cadaver. He knelt before it, holding his mouth and nose with his left hand. With his right he broke the seal of scabbing blood that glued Gazid’s jacket closed, and rummaged inside its pockets. He fumbled, looking for money or information. There was nothing.

  He straightened up, looked around the room. He was thinking strategically. He sought anything that might be useful, any weapons, anything to bargain with, anything he could use to spy.